Woodburn Fire District

Woodburn Fire District has served the Willamette Valley community since 1901, growing into a combination department that pairs career firefighters with paid-on-call volunteers to cover a 75-square-mile district in Marion County, including the cities of Woodburn and Gervais and surrounding unincorporated areas. Five strategically placed stations house the district's engines, tenders, a ladder truck, brush apparatus, and an air unit, backed by a training program built around Underwriters Laboratory and NIST firefighting recommendations.

Call volume has climbed steadily, reaching 3,724 emergency responses in 2024, a roughly 4.73% average annual increase. A FEMA SAFER grant (running through February 2028) allowed the district to add eight firefighters, bringing career staffing to 24 — though the district notes it still falls short of the NFPA-recommended ratio of one firefighter per 1,000 residents for its growing population.

Beyond emergency response, the district runs public-facing programs including CPR/AED classes, fire prevention outreach, and a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program, and is governed by a locally elected Board of Directors.

The district hires through an online employment application portal linked from its Human Resources page, which also posts a recruitment video and current openings; as of this writing the posted opening is a part-time Administrative Assistant rather than a sworn firefighter position.